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Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was an American author, educator, sociologist, speaker, Black liberation activist, and one of the most prominent African-American scholars in United States history. Her book A Voice From the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892) became a classic African American feminist text. Cooper was the daughter of a slave woman and her white slaveholder (or his brother). In 1868 she enrolled in the newly established Saint Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute (now Saint Augustine’s University), a school for freed slaves. She quickly distinguished herself as an excellent student, and, in addition to her studies, she began teaching mathematics part-time at age 10. In 1911 Cooper began studying part-time for a doctoral degree. In 1925, at age 67, she received a doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris, having written her dissertation on slavery. Written in French, it was published in English as Slavery and the French Revolutionists, 1788–1805.
Paul Laurence Dunbar was an American poet, novelist, and playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who were enslaved in Kentucky before the American Civil War, Dunbar began writing stories and verses when he was a child. He became one of the first influential Black poets in American literature and internationally acclaimed for his dialectic verse in collections such as Majors and Minors (1895) and Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896). But the dialectic poems constitute only a small portion of Dunbar’s canon, which replete with novels, short stories, essays, and many poems in standard English. In its entirety, Dunbar’s literary body is regarded as an impressive representation of Black life in turn-of-the-century America.
